Phaneroscopy, Semeiotic, Logic

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), American Scientist, Mathematician, and Logician, developed much of the logic widely used today. Using copies of his unpublished manuscripts, this book provides a comprehensive collection of Peirce’s writings on Phaneroscopy and the outlines of his project to develop a Science of Reasoning. The collection is focused on three main fields: Phaneroscopy, the science of observation, Semeiotic, the science of sign relations, and Logic, the science of inferences. Peirce understands all thought to be mediated in and through signs and its essence to be diagrammatic. The book serves as a timely contribution for the introduction of Peirce’s Phaneroscopy to the emerging research field of Image Sciences.

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Quest of Quest95 An Inquiry into the Conditions of Success in Inquiry (beyond the collection and observation of facts.)96

Looseness of expression, inexactitude is decidedly in vogue nowadays. One might almost say it is all the rage, so assiduously it is cultivated in our thousands of magazines and in books for “the general reader.” When that cultured person is addressed upon any subject of natural science, this looseness cannot well be avoided, since, not knowing the things, he could not possibly understand the implications of the exact terms that describe them. Those sciences are held down to precision, themselves, by the objects with which they are busied. The philosophical sciences, the sciences of the beautiful, the true, and the good, together with all the department of metaphysics, not studying concrete objects, have hardly anything to hold them with accuracy to their propositions except the exactitude of their definitions of words, and when these are forgotten, all their really fine work must crumble and become an occasional hazy reminiscence. But naturally there are swarms of writers who, having done no really fruitful reasoning of their own, can only earn some prestige for the general reader by reclothing what others have said in other words and it is, generally in old ones misused, since they cut the best figure. Besides, it is not everybody, by any means, who can coin a new word that is at all attractive. ← 157 | 158 →

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